


The Rain Song

by archeolatry



Series: Dean's Top 13 Zepp Traxx [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Castiel's Mixtape, Coda, DeanCas - Freeform, Destiel - Freeform, Gen, Led Zeppelin - Freeform, M/M, Post-Episode: s12e12 Stuck In The Middle (With You), Season/Series 12 Spoilers, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-19 00:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11302041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archeolatry/pseuds/archeolatry
Summary: Post episode 12x12, pre 12x13._____"Cas was a braver man than Dean could ever be, even after almost forty years of practice. Dean could hack his way through purgatory and look Darkness in the eye without flinching, but he was afraid of three goddamn words."





	The Rain Song

‘You’re my family. I love you. I love all of you.’

The words echoed in Dean’s head so loudly he couldn’t sleep. There was no position comfortable enough to escape them. The way Cas had looked at him as he spoke cut Dean right to the core. The blood on his face and his hands--the blood everywhere--the sweat and the near-tears... 

Family, Cas said. In what could have been his last moments, Cas was feeding Dean’s own lines back to him.

 

The first time he called Cas family, he didn’t necessarily mean it. It was more in a “we happy few, we band of brothers” sorta way. Dean couldn’t claim to know what it was like to be a soldier (hell, if he’d even suggested that life as a hunter was one damn bit like being in Vietnam, Dad would have beat him bloody), but they’d been through the apocalypse together--the first apocalypse, Dean noted with a smirk--and that was the closest thing to war Dean had ever known. 

And, like family, Cas lied to him. But you never gave up on family, even after they denied you. You never left them behind. You protected them. You forgave them as they forgave you. 

Dean rolled over onto his stomach, grabbing his pillow in a choke hold. 

He wasn’t immediately aware of the second time he’d said it. Not until Cas flew the coop with the angel tablet in tow. Even then he didn’t tell Sam the full story. 

The left side of his face was more shrapnel than bone, and he’d swallowed two of his own teeth in a mouthful of hot blood. Every word was painful, physically and otherwise. Yet when he was on his knees and staring down the business end of an angel blade, he said it again. And still he couldn’t shove three words past his lips. With everything left to lose, he said “I need you.”

He made sense of it later, telling himself that it wasn’t really a Hallmark Movie moment; that ‘I love you’ would have sounded disingenuous when a brainwashed Cas was about to shank him; that he’d say anything to save his own skin. And if they’d all made it out alive--what then? _“You can’t just **pretend** you didn’t say ‘I Love You’ to your best friend. You can’t walk that kind of thing back. ‘Just said it so you wouldn’t shank me, man. No homo.’”_

The third, that booze run in Baby, where he told Cas he was like a brother...he still kicked himself for that. Repeatedly. And the look on Cas’ face as he said it...he may as well have punched the poor guy. He just...

He didn’t want to spend what he thought was the last day on Earth _ever_ thinking how things could have been different. How’d the saying go? 'A taste of honey is worse than none at all?' (Okay, maybe that wasn’t a saying as much as it was a Smokey Robinson lyric, but it was right either way.) It was easier to drink himself stupid and _wait for the sun to die_ than it was to think what could have happened if he’d said “I love you” the first--or even the fifth--time he’d thought it. 

'Family' was a lie to suit them both.

Dean rolled onto his back, tossing the pillow aside and falling into a spread-eagle.

Cas was a braver man than Dean could ever be, even after almost forty years of practice. Dean could hack his way through purgatory and look Darkness in the eye without flinching, but he was afraid of three goddamn words. 

He was so used to throwing himself full Leeroy Jenkins into things that he didn’t consider that Cas could be the one to die first. Not while Cas still had his mojo. But there he was, being slowly poisoned from the inside, weak and miserable, and for all he knew those were his last few moments of existence. Cas was going to use them to give his chosen family a head start. He used them to say ‘I love you’.

Why did Cas have to be such a martyr?

 _“Because of you, you idiot,”_ Dean scolded himself. _“Because he thinks he’s not worth jack unless he’s combination medic, guard dog and helper monkey, and you haven't done one damn thing to convince him otherwise. "_

Dean took a moment to count his sins: kicking Cas out of the bunker so Gadreel could fix Sam, nearly killing him under the influence of the Mark, forsaking him for Amara... 

How many times could you abandon or deny or lie to someone--even if they _were_ family--before they had enough? 

Forget an 'I love you', Dean had barely told Cas how proud he was of him. Never praised his skill as a soldier. Didn't say "thank you" nearly enough. Shit, he'd never even made Cas that Led Zeppelin mix he said he was going to. All the time he spent jerking off, or cleaning weapons that were already clean...detailing Baby simply because he was bored...in all that time, he couldn’t do that one stupid thing? 

It's not like it'd be difficult. Hell, he could fill a whole side with songs that made him think of Cas. "Thank You"... "Stairway"... "The Rain Song"... 

Okay, he couldn’t open with “The Rain Song”-- even the band wasn’t bold enough to do that. It was seven goddamn minutes long! You never opened with a long, slow, soft ballad. But it was a damn fine start to Side 2.

Dean reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a singular shrink-wrapped cassette. He'd found it in the back of a dusty gas station in Tulsa a couple years ago, next to museum-worthy artifacts like Liquid Paper and telephone extension cord. Even if his timing was off, his intentions were true. 

He pulled the album from its sleeve and placed it on the platter. Second song. Easy enough to find the smooth gap between grooves and cue it up. Headphones went into the jack. He placed the tone arm over the gap and pressed the record button with two fingers. 

_"It is the springtime of my loving_  
_The second season I am to know_  
_You are the sunlight in my growing_  
_So little warmth I've felt before_  
_It isn't hard to feel me glowing_  
_I watched the fire that grew so low...”_

There was a tape of the self-titled album in the impala, right? There were two tape decks on this stereo, so he could add “Communication Breakdown”. Or “Good Times, Bad Times”- he wasn’t sure which.

He scrambled around his desktop for a paper and pen, scrawling a list off the top of his head. “Rock and Roll” for sure; he said he was gonna start with that one. “Stairway...” was a given. He had to get some bluesy numbers in there too. Oh, and “Whole Lotta Love”...!

 _“It is to you I give this tune_  
_Ain't so hard to recognize, oh_  
_These things are clear to all from time to time...”_


End file.
